Relationship OCD: The new sex life killer

Do you fixate on every aspect of your relationship? Do you let doubt about your feelings for your partner or your partner’s feelings for you ruin those special moments? Are your fears of abandonment making intimacy with your partner impossible? If so, there’s a name for it: Relationship Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

According to a new study conducted by Guy Doron of the School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya in Israel (posted by Live Science ), there’s also a link between ROCD and unsatisfactory sex lives.

The study defines ROCD as “a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder where the compulsions, like constantly asking whether a partner ‘really means it’ when they express love, can end up fulfilling the insecure obsessions and drive the partner away.”

The most common compulsion in ROCD sufferers inccludes going to lengths to check that a partner is faithful, including repeatedly calling them and looking at personal emails or search histories for signs of infidelity. While Doron estimated that only one percent of the 157 male and female participants of his study might be diagnosed with ROCD based on their responses, the results showed that the more pronounced participants’ symptoms were, the more likely they were to be unsatisfied with their sex lives.

Here’s the worst part of ROCD: If you don’t know you have ROCD and you enter couples’ therapy, you’re actually more likely to do harm to your relationship due to the introspection and analysis of therapy. Treatment of ROCD is akin to the cognitive-behavioral therapy recommended for traditional OCD suffers.

In all seriousness, if you’re constantly dreading your partner may leave you, isn’t having a sex life sort of beside the point?